Off the Record

The bewildering political hokey-cokey in Canterbury - Kent’s most marginal seat - with candidates in then out may have ended but the attritional campaign has continued with an intensity that makes you wonder if voters will by pleading for it to end long before polling day.

It’s often said that the only time politicians are seen is when they are after your vote. But there might just be too much of a good thing based on the armies of volunteers being drafted in to help campaign for their candidates, swamping the constituency with banners, placards, rosettes and other election paraphernalia to shove into letterboxes.

If any of the 77,000 strong electorate are unaware that a poll is in the offing, we’d be surprised. And that’s before visits from the party big hitters get underway.

It can’t be that the election campaign is connected with a petition that has been submitted to KCC calling for a review of the 11-plus, can it? Antiselection campaigners have submitted the petition pointing out that “it has been more than fifty years since the Kent selective school system was reviewed.” Describing the system as becoming increasingly outdated, it highlights how KCC plans to spend millions of pounds on grammar school expansion.

Whether this gets any traction as a campaign issue remains to be seen.

With elections now being fought as much through social media as on the ground, there is the usual proliferation of posts on Twitter attesting - allegedly - to the groundswell of support coming the way of candidates. The advantage is that there’s no way of judging if these claims would stand up to scrutiny in any kind of audit so the parties continue to assert that they have had a “brilliant” response on the doorstep, safe in the knowledge that no one is going to be able to test the veracity.